We're a strategy-to-execution company. So we hold ourselves to the same standard we set for our customers: every piece of work must connect to the bigger picture. No orphan features. No drift. No building for the sake of building.
Our product development follows a framework we call The Product Strategy Cascade — six layers from vision to delivery, each answering a different question at a different altitude.
Guiding question: "What does the product look like when we've won?"
A 3–5 year aspirational state derived from the company vision. Not a feature list — a picture of the future we're building towards. The vision is the fixed point that everything else orients around.
Connects to: Company vision and mission
Guiding question: "What beliefs guide every product decision?"
5–7 non-negotiable rules that resolve trade-offs and keep the product coherent as it grows. When two valid approaches compete, principles break the tie — consistently and without politics.
Connects to: Product Vision — principles exist to protect the vision
Guiding question: "How do we win?"
Our strategic bets, differentiation thesis, and sequencing logic. Where we invest, where we deliberately don't, and why. Strategy is about choices — including what we choose not to build.
Connects to: Product Principles — strategy operates within the guardrails that principles set
Guiding question: "What big problems are we solving this year?"
3–5 themes per year tied to customer outcomes. Themes are stable for quarters, not weeks — they give the whole company a shared language for what matters most right now.
Connects to: Product Strategy — themes are how strategy gets translated into actionable focus areas
Guiding question: "What are we building, in what order, and why?"
Initiatives prioritised using RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) with rolling time horizons:
Connects to: Strategic Themes — every roadmap item must trace back to an active theme
Guiding question: "What ships this sprint?"
GitLab issues, stories, and pull requests — the daily reality of building software. Every piece of delivery work traces back up through the cascade to the vision.
Connects to: Roadmap — delivery is the execution of roadmap initiatives, broken into sprint-sized work
When someone asks "should we build this?" — we check it against the cascade. Does it align with a strategic theme? Does it respect our principles? Does it move us towards the vision? If yes, it enters prioritisation. If no, it's a clear and defensible "not now."
The board talks about vision and strategy. Product talks about themes and roadmap. Engineering talks about delivery. The cascade gives everyone a shared framework — look up to see why, look down to see how.
Vision first. Then principles. Then strategy, themes, roadmap, delivery. We never retrofit strategy around features we've already decided to build. What the team builds is guided by the cascade. How they build it is their domain.
Zontally helps organisations close the gap between strategy and execution. The Product Strategy Cascade is how we do that ourselves — proof that structured alignment from vision to delivery isn't just theory. It's how we ship.
Read more about our approach in our Chief Product Officer Blog post.